In Search of Creative Expression: The Dialectics of Race, Politics, and Literature in Caribbean Dub Poetry / Ieškant Kūrybinės Išraiškos: Rasės, Politikos Ir Literatūros Dialektika Karibų Dub Žanro Poezijoje

Abstract

This article examines dub poetry as an artistic form located along several borderlines, both spatial and cultural. Formulated by poets of African descent, the creative language of dub poets was often conceptualized through the framework of identity politics and an anti-colonial approach. Yet from the 1980s, dub poetry became institutionalized simultaneously within the pop culture industry and in “respectable” venues such as academic research, a process that calls its initial political orientation into question. In light of its differentiated formations, audiences, mediating devices, and forms of reception, however, we might view and evaluate dub poetry not exclusively through the prism of political speech, but also as a cultural form. Based on texts, recordings and performance analysis this article is a call to acknowledge dub poetry, and artistic expression in general, as the result of aesthetic decisions rather than exclusively moral ones.